Is Being Present with the Suffering Enough?: A Christian Examination of Social Justice in a Pediatric BMT Unit

In a pediatric blood and marrow transplant (BMT) unit, the halls are eerily quiet. The doors to each patient room—solid wood with no windows—remain staunchly closed. Yet behind each door lies a child, anxiously awaiting or slowly recovering from a BMT transplant for various diseases from anemia to cancer to immune deficiency disorders. These children represent a unique population within pediatric medicine, a population that is often forgotten. Isolated in their rooms for days, weeks, or even months, these patients can experience numerous psychological reactions such as anxiety, depression, and behavioral problems, yet there is minimal research on interventions aimed at decreasing distress and improving emotional well-being. Familial support has been shown to decrease distress, and the medical team often considers the level of support (or lack thereof) as a crucial factor in their decision on whether or not to move ahead with transplant. Yet what about children who do not have this high level of familial support? What of parents who have to work or have other children to take care of and cannot be present at the patient’s bedside as much as the medical team requires? In this presentation, I will extend Stanley Hauerwas’s call to be with and for the suffering other by arguing that a call to be present with the suffering is a call for social justice. Working from Lisa Cahill’s concept of participatory theology, I will argue that a genuine Christian response to pediatric BMT patients and their families includes not just paying lip service to the importance of being with and for the suffering other, but also strives to provide practical social services to supplement (and in some cases even create) a community of support. By examining a case, I will offer preliminary practical suggestions for what this community might look like. In pediatric BMT care, medicine and theology not only can but must work together to create a morally habitable world for these pediatric patients and their families, no matter their social situation.